Well, it is for the sort of company that exists solely to increase clients' weighting in Google searches, that is.
Google periodically adjusts its search algorithms, in part due to a never-ending war with search-engine optimization firms that try to reverse-engineer the algorithms. Barry Lloyd, who runs one such company, writes about the latest adjustment, dubbed "Florida" (Google watchers use a hurricane-like naming convention):
"... On Friday, 21st November, Google decided to tighten the 'filter'. All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years. We noticed some of our client sites plummeting for their major key phrase from being #1 to total invisibility. Yet this was only in highly competitive areas, not for their secondary phrases. These sites were, in most cases, not highly optimised, had not sought reciprocal links but had achieved their rankings through being on the web for 4 or 5 years. The bad news was that their company name and domain included the key phrase, sites (including directories) linking to those sites included the key phrase in their links and Google interpreted this as over-optimisation and down they plunged. In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories. Something major had happened - but what? ... "
Back to CompendiumI believe initially they turned on an overoptimization filter so they can weed out those results which optimized their way into top results.
They then rapidly respidered the web, performing their ontology calculations. Each time they respidered the web more irrelevant results dropped out and more relevant results rose to the top of search results.
The reason they had to have the results change so much all at once is that was the only way they could safely and effectively perform the ontology implementation.
If you look hard enough you can see how some categories are accidentally intertwined.
Posted by: aaron wall on January 11, 2004 03:02 PMTO HELL WITH GOOGLE.
Posted by: John on February 22, 2004 06:02 PMPost a comment
